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Republicans are trying to steal an election in North Carolina. They have been laying the groundwork for five months, and unless the federal courts intervene, they just might succeed. If they do, it could usher in a new era of election subversion in future contests across the country.

Last November, North Carolina held elections for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Allison Riggs, the Democratic candidate, sought election to the seat she had been appointed to in 2023. Her opponent Jefferson Griffin was a conservative Republican serving on the state’s Court of Appeals.

Riggs won the election by a narrow margin. After a full machine recount and partial hand count, her victory was confirmed by 734 votes. Griffin chose not to concede; instead, backed by the national Republican Party, he continued to fight. Rather than target a few hundred ballots that might eke out a narrow victory, Griffin went scorched earth — seeking to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters chosen exclusively from four overwhelmingly blue counties.

Not only was it unorthodox to cherry pick only certain counties, but so too was his legal theory. Griffin did not accuse these voters of fraud or making an error. Instead, his claim was that — unbeknownst to the voters — the state’s registration and voting processes violated North Carolina law.

Perhaps most shocking, one of the primary targets of his challenge were military and overseas voters. While that might seem surprising, Republicans targeting military voters is part of a broader national trend in recent years, as the GOP has grown increasingly ruthless in its attacks on free and fair elections.

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From the beginning, the Republican strategy was clear: focus challenges on ballots from Democratic areas, create multiple avenues for contesting the results — any of which could flip the outcome — and keep the case in state court, where the 5–1 Republican-majority Supreme Court would ultimately decide the outcome.

For Riggs and her supporters, the best hope lay in federal court, where judges were more likely to view Griffin’s partisan maneuvers with skepticism and to apply the federal Constitution to protect voters.

Last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court handed Griffin the tools he needed to try to steal the election. While it rejected his most audacious claim — that 60,000 votes should be discarded because voters received incorrect registration information from the state — it accepted two other claims targeting military and overseas voters.

Most critically, the court ordered the state to create a new 30-day “cure” period for the affected voters to submit the paperwork necessary for their votes to count. Since these voters reside overseas and are drawn overwhelmingly from Democratic constituencies, the court’s move was a cynical way to tilt the scales in Griffin’s favor under the guise of being evenhanded.

This decision has now pushed the case squarely into the federal courts, where it should have been all along.

At its core, this case is about the right to vote and whether citizens can be disenfranchised after the fact as part of a partisan effort to steal an election. But like so many things involving elections in the Trump era, its implications are far broader.

I led the team of attorneys that defeated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in court. Again and again, judges rejected arguments like those now being made in North Carolina — the idea that a losing candidate can throw out lawful votes en masse to flip the results of a free and fair election.

Judges appointed by both Democrats and Republicans recoiled at the suggestion that voting rules could be changed after the fact simply to achieve a partisan outcome. Cases were dismissed. Lawyers were sanctioned. Courts protected the rule of law and the integrity of democracy.

Since then, however, Republicans have embraced election denialism as a central tenet of their political identity. Voter suppression and election subversion are no longer viewed as unfortunate necessities but are instead celebrated as guiding principles within the GOP.

Despite their best efforts, Republicans have so far failed to convince a court to adopt their radical approach to contesting and overturning elections. That could change with this race in North Carolina.

When Joe Biden was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2021, many of us hoped that the tactics Trump had used in the proceeding months were behind us. Defeated and disgraced, we hoped Trump would leave the main stage of our political system.

Sadly, with his reelection, Republicans are more eager than ever to embrace the Big Lie and have become even bolder in their willingness to engage in mass disenfranchisement to secure and hold power. It’s not an overstatement to say that if federal courts endorse the GOP’s scheme here, it will open the floodgates to similar efforts in the future.

No voter will be safe from disenfranchisement. No ballot will be secure from being uncounted or thrown out. Elections won’t be settled until every possible lawsuit has been filed, heard and appealed. Litigants won’t rest until the last courthouse has closed its doors.

Republicans are trying to steal an election in North Carolina. For the sake of our democracy, let us hope the courts once again prevent that from happening.

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